HD 4870 vs GTX 260: My Experience

[TheBouleOfFools]

For a summary of this long post, skip to the last paragraph.

Let me preface this by saying I am typing this post with a chip on my shoulder and a certain amount of bias, my reasons for which will hopefully become clear.

This is perhaps more of an ATI vs Nvidia driver rant, but as it pertains to compatibility, I hope it is in the right forum.

First, some backstory. Up until about 2 years ago, I was using a computer with an Nvidia FX5700 AGP graphics card. My OS of choice is Gentoo, which I have been using nearly exclusively since its inception. I use KDE as my desktop, 3.5 back then and 4.2 now. The only game I played was World of Warcraft, which ran just fine in Wine with performance comparable to running in Windows XP. By fine I mean it worked, but as this card was becoming dated, it worked very slowly with the graphics engine updates.

I decided to upgrade to a newer generation AGP card, buying the HD 3650 by recommendation. I had a bit of issue getting the drivers working in Gentoo, but eventually I had things running stable. The major problem here was that WoW no longer worked at all. Seconds into starting the game, the screen would turn into a jumble of yellow triangles and there was no text. Games like Counter-Strike continued to work. I tried both Wine and Cedega. I was forced to dual booting Windows XP for WoW.

Even in Windows XP, this card did not work very well. My widescreen monitor took much proding to enable, and when I did finally get it working, dragging windows around was very choppy. So bad in fact that I conceded to using a single monitor. I was told that this was because AMD does not officially support old hardware.

Now on to the present.

I recently got a more modern rig: Asus M4A79T, AMD Phenom II X4 810, Asus EAH4870 DK. I was reluctant to buy another ATI card after my last experience, but the same friend assured me that since this was a more modern computer, it would be officially supported by AMD in Linux.

The first issue I ran into was that running "X -configure" segfaulted, same issue I had with the HD3650. The ati-config utility can be used to generate a xorg.conf, but it only fills in the sections pertaining to the device and screen. This isn't much of a problem. The real problem was that my computer crashed extremely hard whenever trying to start X. I must have power cycled my computer 40 times in two days trying to get a working X. I spent the better part of a week before I finally was able to get X running on a single monitor, although exiting caused a crash as well.

I was told that my problem was because I was using Gentoo, which was not officially supported, and I needed to use Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu and promptly experienced the same problems. Through some more tweaking, I was eventually able to get X working to where I could start and exit without crashing. It seems Xinerama was the cause of the majority of instability, and so I could not use the amdcccle utility to enable multi monitor support (enabling the Xinerama checkbox caused X crashes). I was however able to get both monitors going by putting an xrandr line in my kdm Xsetup. This seemed like a half assed method, but worked mostly ok.

I was still not able to play WoW. In fact, I had the exact same problem with this new card - yellow triangles and no text. In addition to this, the other games like Counter-Strike no longer worked. Resizing windows was painfully slow. I was again forced to use Windows XP. I figured I could have some kind of tenuous pact - Windows for gaming, Linux for music, anime, movies, Matlab, etc. The last straw for me was when X would crash when trying to watch full screen videos. The video would also frequently pause unless I moved my mouse (no, it was not the screen saver).

Earlier today I recieved my Asus ENGTX260 Matrix in the mail. I installed the card, booted into Gentoo, emerged the nvidia drivers, ran X -configure, held my breath and started up KDE. Well, everything works fine. The settings utility let me configure both monitors, window resizing is smooth, WoW runs great, videos are fine full screen. I have not had a crash yet. In short, it's an actual working desktop.

Performance in WoW in Windows XP between the HD4870 and GTX260 is very similar.

I could potentially accept my problems as having some bizzare hardware combination, or using unsupported OSes, or that my card was defective, if it were not for the fact that I had two completely different systems with different video cards sharing very similar problems. To put it bluntly, AMD's Linux drivers are poorly lacking. If you are looking for graphics card to use under Linux, I recommend Nvidia.

[Melcar]

Never had an issue with fglrx once I was mindful of the bugs (like the recent problems with composition).

[Kano]

Some are more lucky than others. Some do not notice tearing, others do...

[Ex-Cyber]

Some are more lucky than others with any vendor. Nvidia's drivers are far from bug-free, but since those bugs don't break WoW for everyone they inspire fewer complaints.

[deanjo]

Some are more lucky than others with any vendor. Nvidia's drivers are far from bug-free, but since those bugs don't break WoW for everyone they inspire fewer complaints.

lol, WoW is hardly the "make or break" app to which drivers are judged.

[Melcar]

Think he meant that in a sarcastic tone.

[Ex-Cyber]

lol, WoW is hardly the "make or break" app to which drivers are judged.For some people it's apparently the make-or-break app against which everything is judged.

[Melcar]

For some people it's apparently the make-or-break app against which everything is judged.


More like WINE being the make-or-break magical app. If your driver doesn't work with it, it sucks.

[TheBouleOfFools]

It wasn't so much WoW for me, it was more X crashing on full screen videos, Xinerama crashing X, switching terminals crashing X, exiting X crashing X, and very slow window resizing.

[RealNC]

It wasn't so much WoW for me, it was more X crashing on full screen videos, Xinerama crashing X, switching terminals crashing X, exiting X crashing X, and very slow window resizing.

No, this is all acceptable. We can live with those bugs. Who wants to watch videos and resize windows and switch terminals and stuff, right? :D But if Wine doesn't work, then, and ONLY then, is it a shitty driver :rolleyes:

[Ex-Cyber]

I'm not trying to imply that WoW was the single thing in this case. In general, though, it seems to prompt a lot more actual complaining than any other specific issue.

[Panix]

Oops, I just posted asking for a comparison of these cards! Do I feel like a doofus or what! ;-) Does the Nvidia GTX 260 work well with WINE?

It sounds like AMD is too slow with developing drivers for Linux still but let's face it, the money is still with Windoze. I guess those cards are similar for performance even in Windows. I really want to support ATI but I am not very patient and after going through the motions installing the Nvidia proprietary driver, I am not sure I would be able to deal with the growing pains of ATI drivers/issues right now. Unless, there are some recent developments with AMD/ATI that would suggest the contrary?

[TheBouleOfFools]

Yes, the GTX 260 works just fine with Wine, at least with the games I'm trying to play.

From what I understand from reading a certain post awhile back, the reason Nvidia's drivers are so much better is because their drivers replace a lot of the bottom half of X, whereas ATI is trying to use the Mesa GL implementation. To me that makes it seem more of a problem with Mesa and X, not so much ATI's drivers.

[bridgman]

It was more DRI than Mesa we were trying to stay with, but using the standard stack was definitely a factor. We felt that it was better to try to work with the standard stack rather than bypass big chunks and make it harder for community developers to justify spending effort improving the framework.

Now that we're fully supporting open source driver development, allowing the X/DRI stack and open source drivers to evolve together, we are starting to cheerfully over-write pieces of the stack ourselves. You probably noticed the first change in that direction a year or so ago, when we started providing the ability to combine multiple FireGL cards into a single desktop and split 3D operations across the GPUs and screens :

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_multiview&num=1

We replaced a bit more of the stack a few months ago in order to provide flicker-free OpenGL compositing across multiple GPUs.

[Kano]

And when do you want to focus on XV?

[Raven3x7]

Well on a sidenote the WINE devs are partially to blame for fglrx's WINE problems, as they not only initially developed WINEs 3d features for Nvidia hardware, but also used Nvidia specific OpenGL extensions.

[grantek]

Yeah, fglrx is giving me less stress/headache than nvidia these days, although it was pretty frustrating when I couldn't use wine for months last year. I'm also using the OSS driver on a different partition and that's been faultless since I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.29 (with RT patches - that's the reason for the second partition).

If I could get some current-generation hardware video decoding out of either driver I'd have no reason to even consider nvidia any more :)

[Panix]

Sorry to interrupt the discussion. I was wondering what PSU wattage you need (generally speaking) for these cards. In particular, the Nvidia GeForce 260 GTX cards. I read on a 'gpu' site, the wattage used is around 200w so if you had a few 120mm fans, 4 or 5 hard drives (1 with the OS), the rest are for data (so are usually idle or not being stressed), a laser printer, an Intel Quad Core Q6600 CPU @ 95w and an aftermarket fan, what PSU would you need? I tried a 'PSU calculator generator' and the calculation was 380w. But, some people are saying you need at least 500 watts so use 600 or higher. My current PSU is the Corsair HX520w (the one with yellow writing and it's modular). Is that sufficient or would I need an upgrade?

I guess the ATI cards of the higher end 4800 series has a comparable power draw. So, it could apply to either card.

I am thinking of building a 2nd, cheaper system, so I could just use this PSU but maybe I wouldn't have to?

Thanks for any reply. I am sure this question has been asked a thousand times but with newer graphics cards drawing more power.... Also, I am sure it depends on what you're doing and what is being stressed.

[bridgman]

The main thing to keep in mind is that graphics cards draw the bulk of their power from the +12 line, so the amount of total +12 current is more important than the total # of watts at all voltages. You may need a 500W rated supply to get the 380W you need at specific voltages.

Most cards include a recommendation for +12 capacity in a reasonably fully loaded system (ie not a RAID-ed server but not an empty box either).

[Panix]

I found this:

HX520W with a maximum +12V output of 480W (i.e. 40A total output)

So, I should be good using this same PSU for a basic setup (no SLI or anything) with either of these cards?

[bridgman]

Yep, I think that should be OK. Just make sure the +12 is only split across a couple of rails, ie if it has 5 +12V outputs each capable of 8A then that wouldn't work so well.

[Fixxer_Linux]

For my experience of my HD4870 with fglrx 9.3, I can say that :
fglrx is a nightmare with Wine apps. To solve that particular topic, I bought a new hard drive (30 €) on which I'll put windows. It'll be reserved for running games from editors that don't even know the meanning of "linux". They probably think that linux is a sort of penguin threatened of extinction and therefore should be taken care by WWF (not the catchers but the ecologists ;)). Far cry 2 will be the first example.

fglrx gives tearing in videos, unless you select acceleration with opengl. This way, you don't get tearing.

fglrx makes run smooth ut2004, but, after all, it a 2004 game. It also makes runs smooth Quake Wars, which is more demanding game by the way. I mean that on a 1920*1200 resolution, not 1024*768. It's real demanding gaming conditions !

fglrx is annoying because I'm stucked @ 9.3 version : Gentoo stable is blocking fglrx 9.6 if xorg-server > 1.5.2-r7 is not installed. All those upcoming versions are marked as unstable (amd64). I also believe that 9.6 can't run with newer 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, the fglrx upgrades are not as fast as ATI is issuing the monthly releases but the fault is also half in the guys who are mainting the distro.

I really like more power management in fglrx control panel, but perhaps is there other ways to achieve that. Nvidia wasn't much more advanced on that particular topic (for old 2004 nvidia 6800 GT).

All in all, I'm rather happy with fglrx and ATI HD4870, but the goal is one day to run fully on open-source drivers. This day will come sooner or later but meanwhile, I really fglrx could be more optimized for linux (even if there is a huge work done by AMD for stabilizing and optimizing it).

[Jaguar07]

Sorry you were the victim twice of ATi.

I stopped buying ATi cards when they stopped making solutions for gamers the first time in 1996 or so. They actually had a press release that year that said something to the effect that they didn't need to make video cards for gamers anymore, they were quite pleased to have the market share advantage for business class onboard video solutions.

I've used Nvidia exclusively ever since.

[Melcar]

Sorry you were the victim twice of ATi.

I stopped buying ATi cards when they stopped making solutions for gamers the first time in 1996 or so. They actually had a press release that year that said something to the effect that they didn't need to make video cards for gamers anymore, they were quite pleased to have the market share advantage for business class onboard video solutions.

I've used Nvidia exclusively ever since.


Never heard that one. I think what you mean is their decision to not compete directly with nvidia in the high end market and instead focus on more affordable single solutions. That actually played out to their advantage since their cards ended up being so cheap compared to nvidia's that it was possible for people to pair up two cards and match the performance of nvidia's high end without going broke.

[Jaguar07]

Never heard that one. I think what you mean is their decision to not compete directly with nvidia in the high end market and instead focus on more affordable single solutions. That actually played out to their advantage since their cards ended up being so cheap compared to nvidia's that it was possible for people to pair up two cards and match the performance of nvidia's high end without going broke.

I'm referring to the time approximately between 1996 and May of 2000 when ATi concentrated on consumer video devices. May of 2000 is when ATi came back to the game with the first Radeon release. When 3DFX was acquired by Nvidia, it left a huge vacuum regarding a quality gaming video card that performed. It actually was a vacuum filled by Nvidia. It worked to Nvidia's advantage much more than ATi. ATi had been in the video card manufacturing business long before Nvidia borrowed CGI systems design and started to make video cards of their own. ATi was around in the early days. When ATi was acquired by AMD, that ended the lesson. ATi is now just another label owned by someone else just like 3DFX.

[monte84]

Using a MSI 4870 here, phenom 9850. have tried both 32bit version of debian and ubuntu. I used to get tearing, but that seem to no longer be much of an issue. HL2/CS:S work fine, hvaent played WoW but I could not get Warcraft 3 to play. CoD4 *works*, with major graphical issues. I also use two monitors, a 22inch widescreen and a 19inch widescreen. To note, for windows, do not try and use CCC to setup two monitors, set it up through windows display manager. Xinerama and BigDesktop both worked flawlessly after I disbaled RandR12 support.

[energyman]

gts 250 - isn't that a renamed 9600?

[deanjo]

gts 250 - isn't that a renamed 9600?

Nope, it's a 9800 GTX+.

[energyman]

Nope, it's a 9800 GTX+.

you mean, renamend 8800GTS...

[AdrenalineJunky]

you mean, renamend 8800GTS...

basically, there are slight differences, the 9800GTX+ has higher clock speed then the 8800, and uses a 55nm die. the GTS 250 has a larger framebuffer then the 9800GTX+

[deanjo]

you mean, renamend 8800GTS...

No I don't mean that, 8800GTS was a 65 nm part, the 9800 GTX+ and GTS 250 are 55 nm parts and as such are clocked higher as well.

GTS 250 55nm
Processor Cores 128
Graphics Clock (MHz) 738 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz) 1836 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 47.2
Memory Specs:
Memory Clock (MHz) 1100 MHz
Standard Memory Config 512 MB
Memory Interface Width 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 70.4

9800 GTX+ 55nm
Processor Cores 128
Graphics Clock (MHz) 738 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz) 1836 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 47.2
Memory Specs:
Memory Clock (MHz) 1100 MHz
Standard Memory Config 512MB
Memory Interface Width 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 70.4

8800GTS (2nd Gen) 65 nm
Processor Cores 128
Graphics Clock (MHz) 650 MHz
Processor Clock (MHz) 1625 MHz
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 47.2
Memory Specs:
Memory Clock (MHz) 970 MHz
Standard Memory Config 512MB GDDR3
Memory Interface Width 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 64

[xeizo]

I can only confirm that Nvidia works almost flawlessly in Linux; I grew tired in experimenting with ATI/Linux and bought the cheapest 9600GT-card I could find. A Gainward, @ ~70$:

1. glxgears -> 23000 fps+ against 550 fps w. ATI(software mesa only, HD4xxx)

2. All native Linux 3D-games run at blistering speed with the highest settings, even FligthGear runs smooth.

3. Did a comparison bench in UT2004 on the phoronix-test-suite against a HD4870 with fglrx(working), the 9600GT was average 5 times faster in all resolutions!

4. Steam installed without a hitch, automatically dled and installed HL2 at my command and I could immediately run it at the highest settings with 4xAA, 16xAF, HDR and reflections on. Totally smooth and with flawless IQ.
That is with a lowly 9600GT.

5. As an unexpected bonus, so does Nvclock work beatifully in trimming the fan duty cycle on the card. At a snap I could make it totally silent at a 25% fan duty cycle during desktop work, I do not need to trim it when I start a game, because the fan duty cycle automatically adjusts itself upwards when it's running 3D under load. Couldn't be better. Originally I was thinking about if I should smack an Arctic Cooling passive gpu-cooler on the card, but thanks to Nvclock there's no necessity :)

3D is in short working, thank's to Nvidia, I can imagine how beastlike a GTX260 or higher must be under Linux :)

I'm running 190.18 under 2.6.31-RC5, and at the moment I couldn't be happier. So much that I decided to pass on HD5870 for my main gaming rig and instead wait for the G300 :D

[TheBouleOfFools]

I somewhat regret bringing up wine now. That particular application not working didn't help, but it wasn't the sole reason I was so frustrated. My desktop was completely unusable.

There are certain things you expect out of a normally working desktop, such as being able to stretch it across two screens, being able to log in and out without crashing, watch videos full screen, etc. I was not able to do any of these things. Even if wine didn't work, as long as everything else did (including native Linux games), I would have been fine.

I brought up wine because it was one of the things I primarily use, and I bought these cards specifically for gaming. I understand that wine is experimental, and has no guarantees of working, however I know from prior experience that wine can and does work. Therefore, I feel I have every reason to use it as a metric to compare video cards.

I am not spending $200 to have glorified 2D support in Linux, with the hope that I'll be tossed some spare support scraps from the hardware vendors. You can say that I should just shut up and use Windows if I want top notch support. I don't think that's right, when there *are* solutions out there that do work. It just happens that ATi was not one of them, for me anyhow. Twice.

I'm also mildly annoyed that support for my older card has been completely dropped in recent drivers. I'm stuck with older drivers that work even less, and will not compile against newer kernels. Not much of an issue I suppose, because all I need is 2D support on that computer.

[nanonyme]

Comparing a hardware-independent software rendering solution to an optimized hardware rendering driver sounds a bit, eh, you know. Was there actually a point in the message too? If you benchmark software rendering, you are benchmarking you CPU, not the graphics card. (let alone glxgears is not a benchmark)

[nanonyme]

I am not spending $200 to have glorified 2D support in Linux, with the hope that I'll be tossed some spare support scraps from the hardware vendors. You can say that I should just shut up and use Windows if I want top notch support. I don't think that's right, when there *are* solutions out there that do work. It just happens that ATi was not one of them, for me anyhow. Twice.A tip if you end up going for Windows: don't be one of the fools looking at retail prices, buy a new computer. You're paying hundreds of dollars extra if you don't buy a whole new computer that ships with Windows. :(

[TheBouleOfFools]

Comparing a hardware-independent software rendering solution to an optimized hardware rendering driver sounds a bit, eh, you know. Was there actually a point in the message too? If you benchmark software rendering, you are benchmarking you CPU, not the graphics card. (let alone glxgears is not a benchmark)

What I meant is, 3D support was so broken with the ATi card that all I had was a $200 2D video card, which only really worked with the open source xorg 2D driver.


A tip if you end up going for Windows: don't be one of the fools looking at retail prices, buy a new computer. You're paying hundreds of dollars extra if you don't buy a whole new computer that ships with Windows.

I only spent $700 on the parts. A computer with equal specs as mine that I would buy prebuilt costs much more. For example, my brother bought a slower quad-core Gateway desktop for something like $1500.

Windows isn't an issue anymore. Since I got the nvidia card I've been using only Gentoo again.

[nanonyme]

I only spent $700 on the parts. A computer with equal specs as mine that I would buy prebuilt costs much more. For example, my brother bought a slower quad-core Gateway desktop for something like $1500.Right, in your case it made sense then. The price of that self-built computer with Windows would probably only have been about $1000, after all. There's still plenty of marginal there. (but isn't with all OEM's and hardware combinations which was my point; marginals are treacherous :3)

[dm0rais]

If you are looking for graphics card to use 3D under Linux, I recommend Nvidia.

Fixed :)..